The way Roberts' often high-pitched brogue wraps itself around sentences is pretty as hell; his voice has never sounded better, nor has it been recorded this clearly before.

Vesper Sparrow, Ellis’ follow-up, is more focused but just as deep, a prose poem rather than a dissertation.

Shellac go straight for your throat and don't loosen their grip until the bitter end.

Like its sister album, it is unexpected, unfiltered, uncomfortably messy, and dizzyingly fun.

The real triumph of Skinty Fia is that Fontaines D.C.’s most musically adventurous and demanding album to date is also its most open-hearted.

Alone is less stripped-down than Impersonator, but it feels less confrontational, too.

Somehow, despite a sound bank that has long since become familiar, Burial keeps finding new ideas to animate his worn, mournful samples.

There’s electricity in this music—literally coursing through guitar pedals, samplers, Eurorack modules, and the DAWs used in post-production, but also between the five musicians themselves.

Faithfull channels her body and mind’s ache into an album that’s her best and most honest work since Broken English. With Negative Capability, she reinforces our links by exposing her own broken places.

If these 35 minutes feel like twice that, it's because Portal thought through every step, packed all of its ideas as tightly as possible, and left it for you to decode.

Earl is carefully whittling away at the proclivities he's always had, remaining confident that he’ll light upon something that feels fresh and honest. So far, he's right.

There’s nothing reserved, nothing toned-down about this record. Though she seldom sings above her speaking register, it’s the proverbial strength of Shygirl’s voice that gives Nymph its undeniable power.

Koze finds home for these misfit songs, and by doing so gets you thinking about possibilities, what else that might be out there waiting to be rediscovered.

She makes no apologies, feels no inadequacy. Over the course of the album, this near-hour spent in the presence of the people she loves, she is reminded that she is equal to any challenge which may befall her.

Four years later, Flatland still sounds ahead of its time, but Cocoon Crush is leagues beyond it. It shows a total disregard for club music’s strictures, concerned primarily not with floor-filling, but world-building.

While not as immediately striking as either Crystal Castles (I or II), the streamlined sound allows more maneuverability and subtle variety in the actual songwriting.

For all the omnipresent menace, it’s often a wildly fun listen.

Producer Gareth Parton (the Go! Team, Foals) wisely handles Little Death with a light touch, engineering some fantastic vocal interplay (like less dramaturgical versions of the Futureheads), and otherwise leaving things the hell alone.

More than just a forgettable pit stop in two wildly careening careers, The Cherry Thing captures some kind of fleeting magic.

No other American singer is repurposing our old folk scripts with so much authority or ingenuity; When I’m Called proclaims—softly, gently, and slowly, with a sly grin and a Southern ease—that what these songs have to say isn’t old at all.

At its best, folklore asserts something that has been true from the start of Swift’s career: Her biggest strength is her storytelling, her well-honed songwriting craft meeting the vivid whimsy of her imagination; the music these stories are set to is subject to change, so long as it can be rooted in these traditions.

Nothing on Active Listening feels quite so urgent or alive as that one gem of a track [“The Eye”], but Empath set themselves a ludicrously high bar. The same destabilizing dopamine rush behind last year’s Liberating Guilt and Fear EP courses through this album.

On Overload, the pop song structures, coupled with the economic, purposeful instrumentation, yields her most concise and moving set to date. A dozen restless years into her recording careers and Muldrow is still reinventing rhythm and blues for the future.

The interplay between lazy strumming and everything-in-its-right-place arrangements effectively rewrites the history of the garage-rock revival, drawing a line between "Last Nite" and Tom Petty and erasing the denial that "Maps" was the biggest song that scene's brief heyday produced.

Tyler uses major-key guitar melodies judiciously, instead of sprinkling them throughout, which makes their shapes more memorable: After the blown-out tape distortion of opener “Cabin Six,” his six-string enters at the start of “Concern” like morning sun through a window.

McMurtry sounds more engaged here, more focused, and more generous to his hard-luck characters.

With each member given ample room for individual showcases, and each coming up with indelible songs and melodies, Feel Flows offers new insight into a creative peak.

In its best moments, In Between sounds both mellow and intense in ways only the Feelies can pull off.